1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a feeding device including a separation unit that separates one piece of the uppermost material to be fed from the following material to be fed from a plurality of stacked materials to be fed to thereby feed only one piece of the uppermost material to be fed, and has an inclined surface separation structure obtaining a separating load by abutting on a tip of the material to be fed, and a recording device including the feeding device.
2. Related Art
In a recording device such as a laser printer, an inkjet printer, or the like, there exists a printer in which a feeding cassette is mounted to be capable of performing the recording of a large number of continuous materials to be recorded (hereinafter, referred to as “paper”). As the feeding cassette mounted in the printer, a separation unit, having an inclined surface separation structure, abutting on an end face of a feeding side of the paper received within the feeding cassette has been widely adopted.
As a separation unit having the inclined surface separation structure in the related art, a separation unit using a separation inclined surface provided in a fixed state has been widely used. Meanwhile, the separation inclined surface disclosed in JP-A-2007-153530 is configured such that the angle of the separation inclined surface is changed by the stiffness of the paper. The angle of the separation inclined surface is increased to increase a separating load resistance when the stiffness of the paper is strong, and the angle thereof is reduced to reduce the separating load resistance when the stiffness of the paper is weak, thereby preventing double feeding of the paper due to the stiffness of the paper.
However, there is a case in which the double feeding of the paper cannot be prevented simply by changing the angle of the separation inclined surface so as to correspond to only the degree of stiffness of the paper. That is, even in the case of papers having the same material and thickness, there is shown a characteristic that paper having a smaller paper width is easily bent, and paper having a larger paper width is not easily bent (detailed description thereof will be made later).
Thus, the separation inclined surface can separate the uppermost paper from the following paper when using, for example, A3 size paper. However, when using A6 size paper, a tip of the paper is upwardly dent to cross over the separation inclined surface, so that the separation inclined surface cannot separate the uppermost paper from the following paper.
In this case, when the same technical concept described in JP-A-2007-153530 is applied to the separation of the A6 size paper, the angle of the separation inclined surface is changed in a direction in which the separating load resistance is reduced, so that the double feeding of the paper may occur.